Shades of Blue

There are many shades of blue and each one elicits from me a different expectation and emotion. I love looking out my kitchen window at our backyard, the gazebo framed perfectly in the Carolina blue sky. If you haven’t seen the sky in Carolina, you don’t know what true blue is: deep, scintillating, saturated, and infinite. I feel my insignificance, but there is certain comfort in the knowledge that nothing that seems life altering really matters in the bigger scheme of the universe.

When we were driving home from the store the other night we passed a house clad in blue Christmas lights. They were cobalt blue and made the house look not festive but like a dark sepulcher, a place to lay and mourn the dead. I was overwhelmed with sadness, remembering the many times I rode in a funeral procession to the cemetery: Dad, Ma, my grandmother-in-law Mama Mack, my sister-in-law Sylvia, my uncles Rocco, Lenny and Punch, my nephew Yancy, and my Aunt Josephine.

Soon after, midnight blue settled in my bones, the kind of blue that leaves me wistful and wanting.

This week is the thirtieth anniversary of my mother’s passing. It might very well be the cause of my blue mood. I’ve understood for years that I carry the legacy of sadness and unspoken words that I only wish had passed between us, and it sneaks up on me every once in a while particularly during the holidays.

Ma loved turquoise, perhaps because it reminded her of the ocean she had crossed to join Dad in America and that separated her from her mother.

Our kitchen, her favorite spot to sit with a cuppa and a good book, was decorated with turquoise print wallpaper. Dad painted the metal cabinets turquoise and the refrigerator was turquoise, too, in contrast to the laminate red countertops and red tile floor. Ma was a study of contrasts, too.

Ma at the kitchen table circa 1982

My youngest brother Andy and I at the table in our turquoise kitchen circa 1967

The holidays often left me sad when I was a kid. Maybe every person, including me, is under the impression that everyone else’s holidays looked like the holidays portrayed in the movies and on television, and we all suffer unrealistic expectations. But the holidays of my childhood had a set progression that began with quiet enough mornings, though the air was rife with tension. Then the tension mounted steadily as the day wore on until detonation. Each holiday was unrelentingly similar. The following excerpt from my memoir is typical of my holiday memories.

(Excerpt from Chapter 3, Guinea Bastard, Shades of Tolerance: A Biracial Love Story)

That night Ma started in after dinner. She yelled over the running water in the kitchen sink to Dad in the parlor reading the paper. “Goddamned little, beady, brown-eyed Guinea bastard,” she said. “Your ignorant mother moved her bowels, didn’t know any better, slapped a bonnet on it, and named it Francesco!”

Dad shook the sports section he held up in two hands and kept on reading. When he didn’t respond, Ma continued.

“You have a woman on the side, don’t you? You don’t care about me. I’m fat and old,” she said. Then she threw one of her precious bone china cups across the kitchen and it smashed against the cellar door. I knew that in short order Dad would explode with anger and frustration. I headed to my bedroom and turned on my transistor radio. I sat on the floor, my legs folded under me, and rocked back and forth, my eyes staring straight ahead, my mind pulling me to daydreams far from home.

The daydreams had me dressed in glittery gowns on the red carpet outside Grauman’s Chinese Theater with crowds of adoring fans asking for autographs. Men lined up to ask for my hand, leaning toward me like the men on the front covers of Ma’s romance novels. Sometimes I saved the town by dragging large dinosaur bones (amazingly still in one piece in the large, hulking shape of the T-Rex) into the town square where the attention of the media and tourists stopped the town from closing down and blowing away in the dessert dust.

Dad reached ignition. “Jesus H. Christ! “ he yelled, and I knew he had thrown the paper to the floor and jumped on it.

“Can’t a man sit down and enjoy his paper after a day’s work? I can’t afford to have a goddamned woman on the side,” he said.

“Your eyes are brown because you’re full of shit! My mother warned me the first time she saw you sucking raw eggs on her front porch. You’re a barbarian. Your children are barbarians. All Italians are barbarians. I left my mother for this!”

“There’s no rest for the wicked,” Dad said, “I work hard. I put food on the table. The house is a mess. You’re all a bunch of prima donnas.”

“Nothing works! I burn my hands at the sink every time I wash dishes.”

“I ought to get a room at the Y and get some peace and quiet,” Dad said.

“I’ve bloody well had it. I’m going to kill myself; I’m going to slit my wrists,” Ma screamed, and I heard the bathroom door slam shut and the lock click. It was not the first time she had said this, nor the last, but each time felt fresh and raw. I raced out of my bedroom to the bathroom door. Andy had beaten me there. We banged on the door. We were both crying.

“Please, Ma, don’t do it!” we screamed in seeming unison. My fists ached from hitting the door over and over and my breath was ragged with terror.

I could hear her jagged sobs. Soon the door opened and she pushed past us into her bedroom. She took a suitcase out of the closet, put it on the bed, threw a few housedresses into it, then slammed the lid shut and lifted it by the handle.

“I’m leaving,” she announced, brushing past us again.

“No, Ma, please,” I wailed, “I’ll try harder to be good.”

Andy grabbed the hem of her housedress, but Ma pressed on. She went out the front door, and we watched her walk down the driveway and out into the street.

Dad went into their bedroom. He shut the door, and Andy and I were without parents at that moment. Suddenly I felt flat and tired. I turned without a word, went into my bedroom, and shut my door. 

###

Dad in the parlor, 1968

(Excerpt from essay Mother Mother)

I was twenty-five when I lost Ma. She had a series of heart attacks over the Christmas holiday that year, and her heart finally gave out. Dad had died eighteen months before. They did not live to see my twin daughters.

But I lost them long before they died and had only begun to get them back in my life before they each left me for good. There were all the years I wished for Ma to step in, invoke structure and obedience, and demonstrate unconditional love. She did not until I was already eighteen, a young adult, entering into an interracial relationship. That would have been the time to just sit back and watch me make my choices, but she could not do that. Causing a breakup between Ronald and me became her obsession, perhaps fueled by late stage alcoholism. Her obsession would cause me not to speak to her for almost three years. When I might have appreciated some well-placed encouragement and perhaps even joy that I had found love, I instead found myself, once again, figuring it out alone.

Then she was gone, and we both lost our chance to right our prickly, intermeshed relationship.

I look at my grown daughters today and marvel at how wonderful I think they are. They are accomplished, confident, intelligent, beautiful, young women who seem to know exactly who they are and what they want out of life. Their twinship, unlike the weirdly ambiguous one between Ma and me, is their strength, one complementing and supporting the other while still being a strong individual.

The three of us are close, but I still worry about my maternal inadequacy. I know that as much as I tried not to, my mothering damaged them in ways visible and invisible, just because I am human and flawed, and so are they. I once told a counselor, sobbing as I said it, “I feel terrible for all the things I didn’t get right as a mother.” She assured me all mothers feel that way at one time or another. I realize my overwhelming sadness was for what I didn’t get right as a daughter, too.

Ruth Alison Elliott Liuzzi, a daughter, a wife, a mother, and an alcoholic, still lives within me, right in the center of my being, a twin in situ. I feel her stirring within me whenever I feel anxious or afraid but also when I feel brave and accomplished or when I think about myself as a mother. I know we did our best to be good daughters and good mothers, in spite of ourselves. I hope Ma realized that, too.

###

I still feel the decimation Ma left behind when she departed thirty years ago, her suitcase sitting empty in the closet, as she had not prepared for that journey.

I am still that barbarian child, the one that was not good enough to make her stay. I am still abandoned and continue to feel the hurt that comes from wondering if I will ever be found and reclaimed, despite being surrounded with a loving husband and daughters. That wonder is manifested in the fragile and estranged relationships I have with my siblings, some of whom experienced Ma’s alcoholism at its worst, and others who didn’t because they had already left by the time the late stage alcoholism consumed those of us left behind.

Yet I don’t blame Ma. I’m not angry with her. There is nothing to forgive, though I sometimes feel I am the one needing forgiveness.

Ma did what she could in life. She was courageous in ways I’m not so sure I could ever be and she made me courageous in ways I am sure she never imagined. At the end of it, I truly miss her, and I don’t question whether or not she loved me, but wonder if she ever learned to love herself.

The many shades of blue are the colors of sadness and hope and distance and healing. I revel in their contrasts as surely as Ma did.

I Love Lucy... and Ricky, Too

I don’t think a lot of people are aware of how difficult it was for Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, married in real life, to convince television executives that they should play husband and wife in the TV show I Love Lucy that debuted in 1951. The executives thought the American public wasn’t ready to see a white woman married to a Cuban man.

Arnaz and Ball took their act on the road, and it was soon apparent that audiences loved them. They went on to become one of the most influential couples in the television industry with their own production company, Desilu Productions.

Before I was old enough to go to school, Ma and I watched reruns of the show in the late 1950s and early 1960s every morning with our buttered English muffins on paper plates and our bone china cups of tea. I learned the dialog by heart, and I found something comforting in the couple that might have been too different for the American public to tolerate. Lucy and Ricky reminded me of Ma and Dad: a couple from different places, ethnicities, and cultures navigating life together. Their relationship normalized my bicultural family life, and tied up my complicated home life into a neat half hour package.

Ma had a sharp sense of humor, not slapstick like Lucille Ball, but lightening quick, intelligent, and keen as a razor. Her words were weapons of mass destruction. I know. I’d been the brunt of them many times.

Dad was no musician, but his artistic expression came from his hands: the way he tinkered under the hood of his car, grew grass on our sandy lot, or fixed one of our old, broken bikes or toys that had been passed from older to younger siblings.

Dad was forty-five when I was born, the fourth of the five Liuzzi children spread out over fourteen years by the time my youngest brother came along in 1961. Dad’s hair was salt and pepper for as long as I remembered, but I saw the photos of him taken in Australia where he and Ma began dating during World War II. His hair was thick and dark, rakish over his brow, just like Ricky’s, and his stance was cocky for such a short guy. He looked as if he could stand up to any big guy who threw a punch at him. I liked that about Dad. He never seemed afraid.

Dad was born on March 7, 1912, and Desi Arnaz was born on March 2, 1917.  Even their birthdays were weirdly congruent.

“Lucy, you got some ‘splainin’ to do,” Ricky threatened in just about every episode.

“But Ricky,” Lucy implored each time while sobbing giant crocodile tears.

The fights between Ma and Dad were more evocative and not at all funny. They didn’t end with a big hug, a romantic kiss, and the soundtrack of I Love Lucy swelling in the background. Ma and Dad’s fights were raw, bubbling with profanity and accusations, and contested with both bark and bite.

Still, I clung to my fantasy that they were like Lucy and Ricky. Maybe Lucille and Desi’s real life marriage was more akin to my parents’ relationship.  It was volatile, turbulent and rocked by Ball’s star power and Arnaz’s much more behind-the-scenes persona.  Added to the mix was Arnaz’s alcoholism and his penchant for women. My family lived with alcoholism, too, but it was Ma who drank, not Dad, who I only saw drink a beer or a glass of wine just a few times in my memory. Unlike my parents, the Arnazes divorced. The divorce gave them the emotional freedom to continue working as business partners for several years and to remain close friends until Arnaz’s death in 1986 at age 69. Ball died just a few years later in 1989. Dad passed away in 1981, also at age 69, and Ma in 1983. My mind makes the connection that others might not see.

I loved listening to Arnaz sing his signature song Babalu, his hair flopping wildly over his eyes, and his hands moving rapidly on his conga drum. I liked the way his feet moved in rhythm to the music, his toes pointed slightly inward. My husband Ronald is a musician and percussionist. His African ancestry makes him the extreme of the dark and ethnic look I grew up loving. I can’t help but draw another connection.

The song I loved best from the show was the theme song I Love Lucy.

I Love Lucy, and she loves me,

We're as happy as two can be,

Sometimes we quarrel but then again

How we love making up again.

Lucy kisses like no one can,

She's my missus and I'm her man;

And life is heaven you see

Cause I Love Lucy

Yes I Love Lucy

And Lucy loves me.

Source: http://www.lyricsondemand.com/tvthemes/ilovelucylyrics.html

The song may sound corny, but I always tear up when I hear it sung by Desi Arnaz. I remember the episode in which he sang it. Lucy thinks everyone has forgotten her birthday. She ends up on a park bench where she runs into the Friends of the Friendless, a ragtag missionary band. She brings them to the club to embarrass Ricky and discovers that he and the Mertzes had planned a surprise party for her. Ricky puts his arm around her and sings I Love Lucy. I witnessed the love in his eyes as I watched it on You Tube again while writing this post.

I look for that same look from Ronald, even after thirty-six years of being together, and I catch it there still.

Both Arnaz and Ball decided that “basic good taste” would guide the humor and the story lines in the show. They never used their ethnic differences as the brunt of jokes, except for Lucy occasionally imitating Ricky’s pronunciation of certain words.  I believe that is why America could tolerate them as one of the most recognized couples of the era. They were just two people who loved one another and who were building their American dream, in their private life and in their TV life.

That’s what all couples wish for. Gay and straight, interracial and homogenous, old and young, we just want to live, love, quarrel, and make up again. What we don’t want is the rest of the world telling us they aren’t ready for us.

Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz may not have realized how much they opened the minds of their audience. They just wanted to portray a couple just like them and felt strongly enough about it to go against the tide.

Now that fear has reared its ugliness and rage in America once again, this time as minority numbers grow and a minority person has taken the highest office in the land, I wish we had another TV show that American audiences might not feel ready for.  It would be a show that uses “basic good taste” in writing its story lines and which stars a couple like Ricky and Lucy or even Ricky and Louis, who win the hearts of Americans and who prove that being different isn’t all that different after all.

I See You through the Window

Ah, the northeast in March – warm, rainy, cold, snowy, sunny, breezy, dank, and howling – all within a couple of days. I could hardly keep up: umbrella, mittens, boots, no coat, or wool coat. My brain ping-pongs like that, too, and I wonder if I am a product of my environment, having lived my first fifty years there. But then rolling my suitcase out to the sidewalk last night, to wait for Ronald to pull up in the car, reminded me how much I like the steady warmth that sits under the air in North Carolina. I like the birds, too, red and blue, rust and fawn, gray and black, their songs and movement, flitting or riding the wind currents, marking my days at the computer as I work next to the window where I have a good view. I found myself comparing them to the raggedy but persistent grackles that drifted and dove through wet, lake effect snow and nested in the steam plant pipes across from my office window in the north. Or perhaps it is the difference in the blue of the sky, one with a purple undertone, the other pure cyan.

I’ve always enjoyed my windows: plates of glass that allow me to experience the world while remaining safe behind them. I remember watching the most spectacular storms rolling in from the northwest through my office window, the lightening cutting the sky in jagged, leviathan flashes. I’d sit mesmerized, and then I’d burst into applause, as if nature were putting on a performance just for me. Sometimes I showed my appreciation with a standing ovation. Here the storms are just as interesting but different. Each rain front moves through like an army of millions, an epic deluge that beats the earth into torrents of red water that rush and choke the storm sewers. The fronts pass quickly and the next follows after a brief respite, then all is warmed and dried by the sun. Sometimes I wonder if I just had a dream, because there is no sign of the rain that just passed through, not even wet pavement.

I experience life as if looking through a window as well. I like to see it like a parade marching down Main, and I can hear its drone through the safe glass. Or I watch it through another’s eyes: Ronald’s or Cara’s or Mackenzie’s. They seem braver than I but I know they don’t always feel that way.

Then life shatters my window, and I find myself right in the muddle, no longer protected, and I’m okay about it. That’s the good thing, I suppose. I’m not as fearful as I think I am or want to believe I am. I’ve got that perseverance I worked hard to instill in Cara and Mackenzie, the thing that got me through watching my mother disintegrate into alcoholism and my father lose his Italian bravado. It’s gotten me through the times that startled my sensibilities, like when people threatened harm to my family or me, because we are interracial. It’s helping me through the aging process, a witness to my own decline, my husband’s, and my in-laws’. It even helped when I lost the chance to watch my parents grow old, because they died too soon.

Life is about what there is and what there isn’t and accepting that the two exist in tandem and in everything. One can’t know happiness without experiencing sadness or peace without chaos. Let it be.

(Excerpt from Chapter 3 Guinea Bastard, Shades of Tolerance: A Biracial Love Story)

Then the deli closed unexpectedly. One day Ma was working and the next day the doors were locked. Maybe the businessmen felt they weren’t turning a large enough profit to continue the venture. But it left Ma swirling in loneliness after all the attention and bitter about returning to life in the house, her world shrinking around her. She started drinking again, more than ever.

I began to sleep less, listening to see if she had turned the TV off before the station had signed off for the night. I listened for her snoring so I could locate her whereabouts – either she was sleeping in her chair, her snores and Dad’s playing in cacophonous stereo, or she was in bed with Dad, their snores melded into an eerie rumble.

I paced my bedroom floor, back and forth for hours, over and over, rhythmic and monotonous, staring trancelike. Or I sat cross-legged in front of the stereo Rocco and I bought with Christmas money – the cheapest one we could find – and rocked back and forth, back and forth, again in a trance-like repose, while the same song played over and over. During these years I was stricken with terrible canker sores running the length of my gums, top and bottom, or along the fleshy part of my mouth, large white ulcers on pink flesh.  They were so painful, I nearly lost consciousness, feeling that moment of loss of control and the weightlessness caused by the drop in blood pressure, when one was touched with a piece of food, or my tongue, or scraped against my teeth.

I often got up at 4:30 a.m. to do my homework as sometimes the fighting between Ma and Dad lasted the evening and was so disruptive that all I wanted to do was read a book or watch TV and stuff myself full of chips and chocolate. Walking out to the darkened parlor before sunrise, I would count how many beer bottles cluttered the table and be able to tell if Ma would hear the whistle of the tea kettle Frank put on the stove before he left for college classes, like an alarm clock to wake her up, or if she would just turn over, more than once letting the bottom of the kettle burn out over the flame. I would shake her and get her up and try to get out the door on time.

Dad worked more and more overtime. We needed the money, but I believe he also wanted to get out of the house. He worked double shifts, or came home from work, ate dinner, slept for a few hours and got up to do the graveyard shift. His face was lined and weary. Ma accused him of having an affair because he was always gone. One day he came home with a band-aid on his forehead and said he got into a fight with one of the other guys. “Mafioso,” he called the bunch of them and said, “They only help each other get ahead.” I wonder if he felt ostracized by his Italian-American co-workers because he had married Ma.

That night Ma started in after dinner. She yelled over the running water in the kitchen sink to Dad in the parlor reading the paper. “Goddamned little, beady, brown-eyed Guinea bastard,” she said. “Your ignorant mother moved her bowels, didn’t know any better, slapped a bonnet on it, and named it Francesco!”

Dad shook the sports section he held up in two hands and kept on reading. When he didn’t respond, Ma continued.

“You have a woman on the side, don’t you? You don’t care about me. I’m fat and old,” she said. Then she threw one of her precious bone china cups across the kitchen and it smashed against the cellar door. I knew that in short order Dad would explode with anger and frustration. I headed to my bedroom and turned on my transistor radio. I sat on the floor, my legs folded under me, and rocked back and forth, my eyes staring straight ahead, my mind pulling me to daydreams far from home.

The daydreams had me dressed in glittery gowns on the red carpet outside Grauman’s Chinese Theater with crowds of adoring fans asking for autographs. Men lined up to ask for my hand, leaning toward me like the men on the front covers of Ma’s romance novels. Sometimes I saved the town by dragging large dinosaur bones (amazingly still in one piece in the large, hulking shape of the T-Rex) into the town square where the attention of the media and tourists stopped the town from closing down and blowing away in the dessert dust.

Dad reached ignition. “Jesus H. Christ! “ he yelled, and I knew he had thrown the paper to the floor and jumped on it.

“Can’t a man sit down and enjoy his paper after a day’s work? I can’t afford to have a goddamned woman on the side,” he said.

“Your eyes are brown because you’re full of shit! My mother warned me the first time she saw you sucking raw eggs on her front porch. You’re a barbarian. Your children are barbarians. All Italians are barbarians. I left my mother for this!”

“There’s no rest for the wicked,” Dad said, “I work hard. I put food on the table. The house is a mess. You’re all a bunch of prima donnas.”

“Nothing works! I burn my hands at the sink every time I wash dishes.”

“I ought to get a room at the Y and get some peace and quiet,” Dad said.

“I’ve bloody well had it. I’m going to kill myself; I’m going to slit my wrists,” Ma screamed, and I heard the bathroom door slam shut and the lock click. It was not the first time she had said this, nor the last, but each time felt fresh and raw. I raced out of my bedroom to the bathroom door. Andy had beaten me there. We banged on the door. We were both crying.

“Please, Ma, don’t do it!” we screamed in seeming unison. My fists ached from hitting the door over and over and my breath was ragged with terror.

I could hear her jagged sobs. Soon the door opened and she pushed past us into her bedroom. She took a suitcase out of the closet, put it on the bed, threw a few housedresses into it, then slammed the lid shut and lifted it by the handle.

“I’m leaving,” she announced, brushing past us again.

“No, Ma, please,” I wailed, “I’ll try harder to be good.”

Andy grabbed the hem of her housedress, but Ma pressed on. She went out the front door, and we watched her walk down the driveway and out into the street.

Dad went into their bedroom. He shut the door, and Andy and I were without parents at that moment. Suddenly I felt flat and tired. I turned without a word, went into my bedroom and shut my door.